Hannah Kent - Burial Rites

‘Well, then.’ Tóti sat down at the table and made a face at Agnes. ‘Would you care for some coffee? There’s only one cup, but I’m sure…’ Agnes shook her head. ‘Please have the bread, then. I’ve just paid a visit to Undirfell and the housewife there stuffed me with skyr.’ He pushed the plate over to Agnes and then poured himself a cup of coffee, shaking a little sugar into it from the stoppered bottle. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Agnes tear off some bread and slip it into her mouth. He smiled.

‘It appears the servants did well with their master’s trading in Reykjavík.’ Tóti felt the hot coffee scald his tongue as he sipped it. His immediate reaction was to spit it out, but he was aware of Agnes’s pale eyes watching him and forced the boiling liquid down his throat, choking a little.

‘How do you like it here, Agnes?’

Agnes swallowed her bread and stared at him. Her face had filled out slightly, and the bruise on her neck had faded almost entirely.

‘You look well.’

‘They feed me better than at Stóra-Borg.’

‘And you get along with the family?’

She hesitated. ‘They tolerate me.’

‘What do you think of Jón, the District Officer?’

‘He refuses to speak to me.’

‘And the daughters?’

Agnes said nothing, and Tóti continued. ‘Lauga seems to be quite the favourite of the Reverend at Undirfell. He says she is supremely intelligent for a woman.’

‘And her sister?’

Tóti took another sip of coffee, then paused. ‘She’s a good girl.’

‘A good girl,’ Agnes repeated.

‘Yes. Have some more food.’

Agnes picked up the rest of the bread. She ate quickly, keeping her fingers close to her mouth and sucking them clean of butter when she finished. Tóti couldn’t help but notice the greasy pink of her lips.

He forced his eyes to the coffee cup in front of him. ‘I suppose you are wondering why I have returned.’

Agnes used her thumbnail to dig a crumb out of her teeth and was silent.

‘You called me a child,’ Tóti said.

‘I offended you.’ She seemed disinterested.

‘I wasn’t offended,’ Tóti said, lying. ‘But you’re wrong, Agnes. Yes, I’m a young man, but I have spent three long years at the school of Bessastadir in the south, I speak Latin and Greek and Danish, and God has chosen me to shepherd you to redemption.’

Agnes looked at him, unblinking. ‘No. I chose you, Reverend.’

‘Then let me help you!’

The woman was silent for a moment. She continued picking at her teeth and then wiped her hands on her apron. ‘If you are going to talk to me, talk in a common way. The Reverend at Stóra-Borg spoke like he was the Bishop himself. He expected me to weep at his feet. He wouldn’t listen.’

‘What did you want him to listen to?’

Agnes shook her head. ‘Every time I said something they would change my words and throw it back to me like an insult, or an accusation.’

Tóti nodded. ‘You would like me to speak to you in an ordinary way. And perhaps you would like me to listen to you?’

Agnes regarded him carefully, leaning forward in her chair so that Tóti suddenly noticed the curious colour of her eyes. The blue irises were as lightly coloured as ice, with ashy flecks about the pupil, but were contained by a thin circle of black.

‘What do you want to hear?’ she asked.

Tóti sat back in his chair. ‘I spent this morning at the church of Undirfell. I went there to look for you in the ministerial book. You said you were from this valley.’

‘Was I in there?’

‘I found the record of your birth and confirmation.’

‘So now you know how old I am.’ She gave a cold smile.

‘Perhaps you might tell me a little more of your history. Of your family.’

Agnes took a deep breath and began to wind the wool from the spool slowly about her fingers. ‘I have no family.’

‘That’s impossible.’

She drew the wool tightly about her knuckles and the tips of her fingers grew darker from the trapped blood. ‘You might have seen their names in that book of yours, Reverend, but I may as well have been listed as an orphan.’

‘Why is that?’

There was a cough from outside the curtain, and a pair of fish-skin shoes could be seen shuffling under its hem.

‘Come in,’ Tóti announced. Agnes quickly unwound the wool from her fingers as the curtain was drawn to one side and Steina’s freckled face peeped through.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Reverend, but Mamma’s asking for her .’ She hastily gestured towards Agnes, who began to rise out of her chair.

‘We are talking,’ Tóti said.

‘Sorry, Reverend. It’s the harvest. I mean, it’s high July, so it’s haymaking today and onwards. Well, at least while the sun holds.’

‘Steina, I’ve come all this —’

Agnes put a hand lightly on his shoulder and gave him a hard look that silenced him. He stared at her hand, her long, pale fingers, the pinking blister on her thumb. Noting his gaze, Agnes removed her hand as swiftly as she had placed it there. ‘Come again tomorrow, Reverend. If you care to. We can talk as the dew dries from the hay.’

PERHAPS IT IS A SHAME that I have vowed to keep my past locked up within me. At Hvammur, during the trial, they plucked at my words like birds. Dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush. They did not let me say what happened in my own way, but took my memories of Illugastadir, of Natan, and wrought them into something sinister; they wrested my statement of that night and made me seem malevolent. Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn’t my own.

I thought they might believe me. When they beat the drum in that tiny room and Blöndal announced ‘Guilty’, the only thing I could think of was, if you move, you will crumble. If you breathe, you will collapse. They want to disappear you.

After the trial, the priest from Tjörn told me that I would burn if I did not cast my mind back over the sin of my life and pray for forgiveness. As though prayer could simply pluck sin out. But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.

Natan did not believe in sin. He said that it is the flaw in the character that makes a person. Even nature defies her own rules for the sake of beauty, he said. For the sake of creation. To keep her own blood hot. You understand, Agnes.

He told me this after the two-headed lamb was born at Stapar. One of the servants had run to Illugastadir to tell of it, but by the time Natan and I arrived the lamb was dead. The farmer had killed it on sight because he thought it cursed. Natan asked to take the body so that he might dissect it and learn how it had been formed, but as he unburied the lamb, one of the women walked up to him and spat: ‘Let the Devil take care of his own.’ I watched as he laughed in her face.

We carried the strange thing to his workshop, and, covered with blood and dirt and sickened to the heart, I left Natan alone to butcher it. Sigga and I did not eat the scraps of meat he cut from it, and although he called us ungrateful, although he reminded us of the number of coins he’d exchanged for the twisted corpse, his appetite was not great either. We left the meat for fox bait. The twinned skull he kept in his workshop, the bone the colour of new cream.

I wonder if the Reverend sees me like that lamb. A curiosity. Cursed. How do men ever see women like me?

But the priest is hardly like a man at all. He is as fragile as a child without the bluster and idiocy of youth. I had remembered him as taller than he is. I hardly know what to think of him.